Yow. 78 messages and counting. Er, 79 now. I'll bet poor Giorgos wishes he never started this thread! Get ready..... get set.... DIVE!

A good friend of mine has, for at least the last two decades, used something along the lines of:

if ( $?prompt ) then alias rm 'mv \!* $HOME/misc/trash' endif

However, it seems that the correct solution is to create a new option, -I, which puts rm into 'idiot user mode' and has all the desired confirmation effects listed in this thread and none of the undesired effects such as -i returns. Then if anyone wants to use it they can just create an alias similar to the above for -I and poof, problem solved. It's fairly easy to detect '*' and ask for confirmation, and also easy to ask for a single confirmation on a directory (not ask again for any recursion).

Then you guys can argue over whether the alias should appear in the system-wide default csh.cshrc and friends, rather then argue over the destruction of rm's basic nature. I will only point out that 'rm' is used fairly universally in scripts and there are obviously things other then '/' that you would want to ask confirmation for that just as obviously cannot be made default operation for rm.